2016 is finally over (good riddance), and today is January 1st, the first day of a brand new year. In the spirit of the occasion, I thought I’d share with you some resolutions I’d made for things I hope to improve on in the year ahead.

I will not attempt to beat traffic by tailgating emergency response vehicles.

Driving ranges and shooting ranges are not functionally interchangeable.

There are inherent limits to the freedom granted by the phrase “dress code optional”, and I would be wise to keep this in mind.

I will not use the power of positive thinking for evil.

My phone bill does not exist in a simultaneous superimposed state of “paid” and “overdue” until I open the envelope and observe its contents, quantum mechanics be damned.

I will not try to patent any invention that’s more than a decade older than I am.

I cannot get diplomatic immunity simply by being exceptionally polite.

I will not sing along to the music in the elevator. Especially if I don’t know the words.

I will not bury time capsules with contents specifically selected to mislead or confuse future archeologists, and I will definitely not bury them on someone else’s property.

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Recently, I’ve become aware of a strange, cryptic, geometric symbol that’s been cropping up in the oddest of places, and for the past several weeks it’s left be rather baffled. It’s a pretty simple design—a perfect circle, with a small squarical section taken out of the middle, with the left portion divided in half to form a backwards letter C—but it’s actual meaning continued to allude me.

At first, it was just in the rear window of this one car I see occasionally around town. The symbol appeared to have been cut out of faded construction paper and taped to the window (possibly using packing tape), so naturally I assumed it was homemade, though I couldn’t imagine what it might mean. Perhaps some sort of personal emblem? Hey, I’ve got a personal emblem. Who am I to say this other fellow can’t have one of his own?

(In case you’ve forgotten)

I noticed that I was seeing the car with the backwards C a lot. At least, I assumed it was the same car. I hadn’t been really paying much attention to what kind of car it was. I was mostly just trying to figure out what the hell it meant. But when I started seeing the symbol in other, nearby cities, I was forced to confront the possibility that perhaps there was more than one car bearing it. After all, the only other explanation was that I was being followed… by a car driving in front of me. And honestly, even at my most paranoid that doesn’t really sound plausible.

After that, I started to notice that, yeah, no, it’s totally not the same car every time. All different models, too. I felt a little foolish for not noticing that before, but give me a break, I was focusing on the symbol. Oh, and driving. I was focusing on driving too. That part’s important. But this meant it wasn’t a personal emblem, which brought me back to my original conundrum. What the hell could this curious rune possibly mean?

I briefly considered that it might be the logo of some sort of ride-sharing service, since I recalled seeing stickers identifying ride-share cars occupying the same space on other cars’ rear windows. I quickly discarded this theory due to the cheapness of the decal and the fact that I already knew the logos of every notable ride sharing services, and none of their names started with C anyway. Maybe it was a political statement, like the blue equal sign that represents equality. If this was the case, I couldn’t imagine what cause it might indicate support for. Its meaning was just as opaque as ever. Perhaps these people were supporting the “open source” intellectual property system known as Copyleft (a play on “copyright”), which is also represented by a backwards C. But if that were so, why not just use the pre-existing copyleft symbol, which was an inverted copyright sign? Hell, maybe there’s just some new shoestring-budget fraternal order that’s rolled into town. I don’t know.

Realizing that I was never going to figure it out on my own, I turned to the internet for guidance, armed with a crude reproduction of the symbol I’d thrown together in Photoshop (though admittedly, it wasn’t much cruder than the original symbol).

Soon, I had my answer. As it turns out, I’d been too quick to dismiss the ride-share theory. But that doesn’t mean there was a new company throwing its proverbial hat into the ride-sharing game. Oh no, this logo represented Uber™.

Wait… what?

No seriously, these are the same company. Because f██k logic, that’s why.

There’s this weird trend I’ve noticed among internet-based companies where they all seem to suffer from this bizarre compulsion to completely redesign all of their logos and other graphic materials roughly once every half hour, for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Uber™ (or “Ↄber™”, as I suppose they must want to be called now) is seemingly no exception to this trend. And apparently they’ve hit the bottom of the barrel early, because like The Website Formerly Known as deviantArt™, they’ve decided to scrap their clearly identifiable monogram in favor of an utterly incomprehensible glyph which nobody, anywhere would know was associated with their brand without first being explicitly informed that it was.

So there’s got to be some underlying logic behind Ↄber™’s choice of emblem, right? Well, there’s a reason, but I’m not sure you can call it “logic”. Allegedly they designed it to “better represent what [they] were going to become,” which raises oddly existential questions about what exactly it is they think Ↄber™ is going to become. Apparently, the circle represents “atoms”, and the square in the middle represents “bits”. Nobody seems to be entirely sure what “atoms and bits” refers to. It’s probably referring to matter and data, for whatever reason, but it could just as easily be something else entirely.

Sure, why not?

And even if we are talking atoms of matter and bits of data, what the hell do either of those have to do with ride-sharing? Or Ↄber™ itself, for that matter? From what I’ve read, nobody seems to know. Even the company themselves can’t come up with anything other than the pretentious borderline incoherent claim that “the unique aspect of Ↄber is that we exist in the physical world […]” (if existing in the physical world is unique to Ↄber™ what the hell is literally everything else in the universe?) “[…] We exist in the place where bits and atoms come together.” So in other words, it has absolutely nothing to do with ride-sharing, and everything to do with drugs (or possibly late-onset schizophrenia). Frankly, I could swap that out for a randomly selected quote from that Time Cube site and it’d make just as much sense. Possibly more.

Of course! It all makes perfect sense now. Why didn’t you just say that in the first place?

Unsurprisingly, there were no actual graphic designers involved in this change. Ↄber™ CEO Travis Kalanick designed it himself because he “didn’t trust anyone else”, and was inspired by the tiles in the bathroom. I see no way of interpreting that as anything other than confirmation that yes, drugs were absolutely involved. Ↄber™ has offered no explanation for why their new labels are made out of old construction paper.

Moral of the story: If you don’t talk to your boss about bad design, who will?

Imagine if you will that instead of being the product of thousands of years of emergent storytelling, coming up with mythology was somebody’s job, presumably at some sort of firm. Now imagine that one of the people working at that firm—let’s call him “Jerry”, just for the sake of the scenario—woke up one morning with a hangover and it suddenly realized that he was supposed to have a big presentation today of the mythical creature he’d been working on. Jerry calls the office, and discovers to his horror that the creature department had a major server crash during the night and they’ve lost everything. Desperate, Jerry hastily throws something together and prays to whomever it is he prays to that nobody would notice.

Now, that scenario is, of course, ridiculous. But if that were to happen, the result would probably come out looking something like the rompo.

There’s very little information I’ve been able to track down on the creature, but I do know a few things. It has the front legs of a badger and the back legs of a bear, the head of a hare, the ears of a human, and the torso of a skeleton. That’s 4 different animals, and a skeleton.

It feeds on human corpses, so it falls squarely within the criteria for what’s traditionally classified as a “bad” creature, but then again, the phrasing (“corpses” rather than “people”) suggests that it doesn’t actually kill anyone for its meals, preferring to nosh on whatever dead people it finds just lying around. So… less something a king would send a brave knight in shining armor to slay, and more along the lines something an undertaker might call the Orkin man to set traps for. It isn’t so much a horrible monster as it is a vaguely creepy pest.

What really gets me is its voice, described as “crooning”. Now, I know that this word originally meant a sort of soft, melodious humming, and that that’s probably the sense in which it’s used here, but I can’t help but imagine the freaky little weasel monster wandering around a graveyard belting out Fly Me to the Moon or Ain’t That a Kick in the Head.

All in all, the rompo always struck me as a bit rushed, hence my little story about Jerry and his workplace dilemma, but nonetheless I consider it another one of my favorites. It feels lazy and forced, but with such earnest conviction that the resulting bathos lends it a certain charm. It may not be the sort of monster that you scream and cower in fear from, but it is absolutely the sort of monster that one might dress up in costume and attend a midnight screening of (if monsters worked like movies, which they don’t), and in my book that’s just as good.

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My latest voyage into the unknown wastes of the Guadalupe pseudo-desert got off to a bit of a rocky start. Even when you’ve gone out of your way to prepare for everything that can possibly go wrong, it seems there’s always the possibility of something going wrong that you hadn’t prepared for. Having previously discovered and subsequently named the (alleged) Curse of Cecil B. DeMille, I probably should’ve taken this a some sort of bad omen, but in the great horror movie of life, I’m that arrogant intellectual guy who balks at the suggestion that vampires might be real even as the blood is being messily drained from his neck by some impossibly old European creep in a costume-shop opera cape, so I didn’t.

One of the things I’ve noticed on my various excursions is that Santa Maria, the closest real (but still rather small) city to my destination, has a ton of motels. I imagine serving as a stopover for people from Southern California taking road trips up north, or vice versa, must be one of the major industries here, because nearly every major motel chain seems to have a branch in town, and there are entire streets worth of little local places. There are even a few real hotels. There’s a FedEx airstrip just outside of town, of course, but there’s only really three planes there at a time, tops, and FedEx planes don’t exactly carry passengers so I don’t think that alone really justifies the disproportionate amount of accommodation available for out of towners. There’s really an awful lot of places to rent a room for the night, is what I’m saying.

Why do I bring this up? Because every single one of them was sold out. I went to the Best Western, and they sent me to the Travel Lodge. I couldn’t find the Travel Lodge, so I went to the Holiday Inn, and they sent me away as well, assuring me that there were no rooms available anywhere in town. Supposedly there was a wedding, a softball match, and a soccer match. There must’ve also been some sort of biker meetup rolling through town, because traffic both in town and on the journey back home was repeatedly held up by enormous hordes of bikers zipping past along the dividing line.

As it turns out, my stubbornness paid off, relatively speaking anyway. Despite the assurances of the guy at the front desk of the Holiday Inn, I was able to nab what was apparently the last room in town: a smoking room in the Motel 6 right next to the freeway (though to be fair, around 75% of the town is right next to the freeway), which from the way the lady at the desk described it, had apparently been rejected by other prospective guests earlier that day. But it didn’t appear to be haunted, the air freshener they used to drown out the tobacco stench of the previous tenants was subtle enough to not totally overwhelm my sensitive olfactory cells, and it was far too late in the day to turn back around and start the 3-hour trek back home, so I took what I could get.

Upon settling into my room, I decided to give myself a quick refresher on the use of my borrowed Garmin GPS, only to discover that the batteries had died and had to locate and download a copy of the user manual just to figure out where the battery compartment was even located, no less how to open it. This was, however, easily resolved the next morning (a curse cast in the age of silent film really can’t be expected to account for the ease with which a 21st century man can obtain AA batteries) and the GPS proved fairly intuitive to use, so I gassed up the car and set out.

A cool wind was blowing off the lake when I arrived at Oso Flaco, and with the Garmin telling me exactly where the fabled lost city I sought was located—less than a miles hike away from the trail—I was feeling quite optimistic about my chances of finding it.

That didn’t last.

It seems that with all the time and effort I’ve spent on the intellectual challenge of finding deMille’s Lost City, I’d neglected to put any thought into the physical challenge of actually reaching it. As a born city-dweller who has always seen nature as something to be admired from afar, I have almost no experience with wilderness hiking. Because of this, I made the rookie mistake of assuming that hiking is just like walking in that a short hike automatically means an easy hike. This is not the case. Between the steeply angled dunes, the treacherously shifting sand, the thick-growing desert scrubs and my own moderately sub-par physical condition, it rapidly dawned on me that this hike was one I simply wasn’t adequately equipped to make, and I was forced once again to turn back.

On the road out of Santa Maria, a large convoy of assorted fire department vehicles passed me going the other way. Their sirens were off, so I didn’t think much of it. But as I approached the twisting mountain road that joined the two highways along my route, that now all-too-familiar acrophobia was suddenly joined by a dread of something much more terrible as I past a sign warning me in big red letters that today’s forest fire risk level was “EXTREME” and I remembered the news reports on the spate of record-shattering wilderness fires that had been plaguing Southern California most of this season, and the small amount of gasoline that had spilled on the outside of my car when I removed the slightly defective gas pump filling up this morning.

When I stopped in Santa Barbara for a rest, a snack, and a chapter of Machen’s The Great God Pan, my fears seemed to be confirmed as I found the entire town cloaked in a cloud of what appeared to be smoke, so thick that it turned the ocean to the west all but invisible and called to mind my brief experience with the Silent Hill franchise. I didn’t smell smoke, but then again, my own home town of Pasadena has allegedly had a smoke problem for the past week, and I never smelled that, so I wasn’t sure.

As I continued south, my journey was punctuated by alternating bouts of apprehension and reassurance as I mentally debated whether the cloud that still covering me was really smoke, or just whatever the hell weird-ass low-hanging cloud phenomenon I’d encountered during my last excursion. Much of the vegetation to my left appeared to have been recently burned, and I thought I felt the air heat up and my eyes start to burn a few times, but that might’ve just been my imagination. The cloud kept up all the way past Ojai, and I told myself that it must be fog, because even the largest blaze wasn’t that big. Still, every time the traffic slowed to a crawl, I held my breath, nervous that it might be due to some sort of road closure caused by the fire.

It wasn’t. I never saw any fire, and none of the roads were closed. In fact, most of the times the traffic slowed, it was caused by the entire left lane having to move over to let all those bikers I mentioned earlier pass, or everyone rubbernecking at one of the minor accidents they’d left in their wake. Not that seeing a ten thousand maniacs on motor bikes zip past at the speed of sound, so close that they’d have hit me if one of them so much as sneezed wasn’t alarming in its own right. Still, by the time I reached Thousand Oaks and the cloud finally started to let up, I still hadn’t found out for sure whether it really was smoke or not.

As much as I hate to leave the story that has become the Cecil B. deMille Saga without a satisfying conclusion, I don’t think I’m going to be doing this again in the near future. I’m not exactly going up to Santa Maria just for the local color (you can get that anywhere), and my true destination is blocked by a hike that is, for me, currently impossible. I don’t see much point in traveling three hours, two days, and three tanks of gas just to stop within a mile of somewhere I can’t reach. For the time being, it seems best to demote visiting the Lost City from an active goal for the immediate future to the proverbial “one that got away”. Perhaps some day I’ll be ready to go back and try again, but I’m sad to say that it’s time for this particular chapter of the deMille Saga to come to an end.

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I’ve just finished setting up shop for the beginning of my trial run on Etsy. Currently my stock is limited to single copies of ten of my favorite works of mine, but if these do well, a larger stock is soon to follow.

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I’ve just finished updating my copyright policy to allow all you guys to share my work to a handful of approved sites, and added the appropriate sharing buttons to all my posts. I’m still waiting on info on a handful of sites not currently included to see if I can add them as well.

And before you ask, no, I will not be adding sharing buttons for Facebook, Google+, or Tumblr. Ever. Unless, of course, they get their shit together at some point in the foreseeable future and rewrite their policies in a way that doesn’t completely disregard the intellectual property rights of content creators (and, for that matter, international intellectual property law), which doesn’t really seem likely given their history.

On an unrelated note, in the process of adding the sharing buttons to all my posts, some of them actually had their content deleted. I’m pretty sure I fixed all of them, but if you see a blank post, let me know and I’ll fix it. Thanks.

The True False Prophet has spoken!

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This is kind of a new feature I’ve decided to start posting here on the BrokenEye Media blog. I’m starting a series of illustrations depicting various mythological and folkloric creatures, both well-known and obscure (but mostly obscure) that I think are interesting, with a description of each in my usual turgid, irreverent, aside-laden parlance, in the tradition of mediæval bestiaries. However, unlike mediæval bestiaries, I’m abandoning all pretense of having anything to do with beasts allegedly found in nature, and I will not be going way out of my way to shoehorn an unnecessarily preachy and ridiculously contrived lesson on woefully outdated middle-aged quasi-Biblical morals into each description (which they did, because mediæval theology was weird). So if the Word of God as (allegedly) taught by the (allegedly) natural creatures (allegedly) of His Creation is what you’ve come here for, I’m afraid you’re going to leave disappointed, but I doubt that it is. So, without further ado, here’s the first entry in the Bestiarium:

This one is probably one of my favorites because of how… creatively horrifying it is.

Though it can be described as the Aboriginal version of the vampire, the yara-ma-yha-who actually has very little in common its European brethren. True, it is a monstrous humanoid that sucks the blood of humans and can transform them into one of its own in the process, but the similarity ends there… which isn’t nearly as reassuring as it may initially sound.

This little red man makes it home in the branches of fig trees where it waits patiently and surprisingly stealthily for some poor, unwary traveler to pass by. When they do, the yara-ma-yha-who strikes in an instant, ensnaring them in its long, tentacular fingers lined with tiny lamprey-like suckers which it uses to slowly drain their blood. Not that it needs the blood for sustenance, mind you. It’s just that prey that’s weak from blood loss tend to be much less likely to resist or fight back. Once the creature’s hapless victim has been rendered nice and languid, the yara-ma-yha-who unhinges its toothless jaw and swallows them whole. After taking a drink from a nearby stream (because its important to stay hydrated), the monster takes a nap, it’s prey imprisoned—weak but very much alive—in its distensible stomach. When it wakes, it vomits up its victim, their skin ever-so-slightly redder, their build ever-so-slightly shorter than before.

If the victim is lucky, they’ll merely be sent on their way (feeling utterly horrified and no doubt somewhat violated) with the knowledge that they should stay away from that tree, lest they be caught and swallowed again. If they’re not lucky, the beast will skip the waiting, grab them again and repeat the process right then and there, swallowing and regurgitating them again and again until they’re completely transformed into another lurking yara-ma-yha-who ready and patiently waiting to prey on innocent travelers.

So yeah, kinda like a vampire, but a thousand times more abhorrent and not even remotely sexy. Unless you’re into that, I guess, though the knowledge that there are actually people who are into that (whatever the hell that is) just makes the whole thing all the more abhorrent.